I love this meme. :)

I love this meme, the interview meme. Ask me five questions and I’ll answer them. I might even manage to ask you five of my own. :)

From Stella:

1. What was the first thing you did (after hanging up the phone of course) when you learned you’d sold a 3-book deal to Luna?

Shrieked and leapt around and hugged Ted and shrieked and shrieked and shrieked. Ted had to dial my parents to tell them because my hands were shaking so hard I couldn’t operate a push-button phone. Then I shrieked at them. :)

2. You’re on Too ALLA TIME. How do you find time to RP, with the writing and the walking and *everything*?!

I don’t. :) I hang out on Too to socialize, and even then I idle a great deal. When I do RP, it sucks away my will to leave the desktop computer, which is dangerous.

3. How did you meet your husband, and what was your first impression of him?

I believe the first time I met actually *met* Ted was at my 20th birthday party (which was held exactly 6 months after my birthday. It was a surprise party. I was *very* surprised.), although I was somewhat aware of him previous to that. He was either dating my friend Mary Anne, or simply attending the party with her, at the time. I thought he seemed nice.

Later, he *was* dating Mary Anne, and I decided that made him a nice safe target for a crush after my boyfriend of 3 years graduated and left Alaska. My nice safe rebound crush was somewhat disarranged by them breaking up a few weeks later. :)

4. You’ve lived in the continental US and in Alaska. Where else have you travelled, and what is your favorite place?

England, Ireland and Norway. I think it sounds absurd to say that visiting Ireland felt very much like going home, but it did. I love the country. The stereotypes are all true–everyone is that friendly, it’s that green, it rains that much, they drink that much… :)

My favorite place in the world is a bluff on the far side of Cook Inlet from Homer, in a little secluded area called Petersen Bay. It will be 19 years at the end of May since I’ve been there.

5. Romance novels: for good or ill? (I know the answer, but I want you to share the very good points you make with everybody else.)

*looks nervous* I have absolutely no idea what good points I make that you think I should share. But I’ll do my best. :)

…and this has gotten *very* long, so I’m going to put the romance answer behind a cut tag. Click through if you’re on LJ and want to read. :)

miles to Rauros Falls: 111.5

Once upon a time I was one of those obnoxious people who thought romances were easy to write and anybody could do it and obviously anybody did. Then I tried to write one and discovered it takes a great deal more skill than I thought it did, and I’d like to think I’m a bit less snotty now.

I think romance is like any other genre: it has good writing and it has bad writing. It certainly has a stigma attached to it, as does sf/f (I’m not so clear about mystery, although there’s generally a clear disdain for genre or commercial fiction among the literatti, so probably mystery suffers from it too), but the truth is, good romance novels are just as much pure fun to read as any other kind of well-written book, and bad romance novels are no worse than reading badly written books of other genres.

Except:

There is a very particular style to romance that is considerably less present in mystery and sf/f writing. I believe it’s largely a method of approach. Romance approaches the story from an emotional point of view. The most important aspect of the story is the emotional aspect. Mystery and sf/f tend to approach stories from an action point of view; emotional entanglements may be a big part of the overall story, but the focus isn’t on those problems.

As someone who grew up reading mysteries and sf/f, I find the romantic approach to be difficult to deal with a lot of the time. So many problems appear to be fixable if only the hero and the heroine would actually talk to one another, but if they did that, the book would only be thirty pages long. For me, personally, as a reader, this is a big problem with romance novels. But it’s a surmountable problem; most of the romance I read is recommended to me, and most of it doesn’t have that kind of mistake in the writing. (See, for me, it’s a mistake in the execution of the story. For a romance fan, it’s a window into experiencing the characters’ emotions and thoughts. Totally different mileage.)

Now: there’s a critical difference between Romance Novels, The Genre, and romance as traditionally defined in literature. Modern romance novels have a core expectation of a happy ending. They’re stories about hope and love and second chances, and I think that’s probably their strength. They offer the possibility for joy in a world where I think people probably don’t get enough of that.

Personally, I like my romances to be a little messier than that. Don’t get me wrong: I like happy endings, too, and I’d rather my good guys took the day than all died horribly beneath the bad guys’ guns. But take the Arthurian romances. Not at all modern-day romances, those stories. Those are *tragedies*. There is no happy ending. And man, nothing beats the sheer agonizing heart-wrenching awful goodness of knowing that no matter how the storyteller tells the story, it’s just all going to turn out badly in the end. Me, I love a good Pyric victory. (And then if you can find some way to make it work out, after all hope is gone, now *that*, my friends, will have me weeping at your door for more. This is why I love Guy Gavriel Kay so much.) So probably if I had my way, Romance The Industry would have a little more uncertainty about those happy endings–but I’m not about to try to change the industry. :)

I think almost every story in the world is driven by romance, though not necessarily romance-industry style romance. People do amazingly stupid things for love, and you get stories out of that. You get stories out of relationships. If you pick up your latest big fat fantasy novel, odds are very good that your hero’s going to be either doing something in the name of love or falling in love on the way to doing something. There are very, very few stories that don’t involve romance; it’s an eternal aspect of the human condition.

…I suspect I could go on, but it’s getting late (I wrote this last night, but then it wouldn’t post) and I’m quite tired, so I think I might leave it at that, and hope I hit at least a few of the wise things Stella thought I had to say on the subject. :)